THE SPORTING PAGES OF HISTORY

“The pheasant appears to have been especially invented in order to provide not only the best of shooting, but one of the finest table birds.” So begins the sportsman, soldier and spy Major Hugh Pollard in his 1936 opus, Game Birds & Game Bird Shooting, in his chapter concerning Phasianus colchicus.

“The history of the coming of the pheasant to Britain is still obscure,” adds Pollard, whose storied career saw him fight in the First World War and run an MI6 station in Madrid in the late 1930s. “Actually, the native habitat of our original black-necked pheasant was the River Rion in the district of Colchis near the Black Sea [modern-day Georgia]. The bird, however, occurs in a wild state as far west as Dalmatia, and there is abundant literary evidence, mainly gastronomic, which shows that he was well known to the ancient Romans.”

But the Romans did not bring the